At Least Being Railroaded Isn’t as Bad as Being Waterboarded

You may have heard that John Kiriakou, who worked undercover and as a terrorist logistics specialist for the C.I.A. before retiring, took a plea and admitted that he violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Scott Shane of the New York Times explains why. First, his family’s financial difficulties that followed in the wake of his charges

… were complicated by Mr. Kiriakou’s legal fees. He said he had paid his defense lawyers more than $100,000 and still owed them $500,000; the specter of additional, bankrupting legal fees, along with the risk of a far longer prison term that could separate him from his wife and children for a decade or more, prompted him to take the plea offer, he said.

This is only the first case prosecuted under that act since Defense Department official Lawrence Franklin was charged with leaking to AIPAC, in 2005. Shane writes:

Thus Mr. Obama has presided over twice as many such cases as all his predecessors combined, though at least two of the six prosecutions since 2009 resulted from investigations begun under President George W. Bush.

One can’t help but conclude that the charges brought against Kiriakou were, in large part, an indication of just how angry the C.I.A. and the administration were with the criticism of waterboarding that, post-retirement, he’d aired out in the media. His actual crime, meanwhile? Shane’s explanation is worth posting in its entirety.

In 2008, when I began working on an article about the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, I asked him about an interrogator whose name I had heard: Deuce Martinez. He said that they had worked together to catch Abu Zubaydah, and that he would be a great source on Mr. Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was able to dig up the business card Mr. Martinez had given him with contact information at Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the C.I.A. contractor that helped devise the interrogation program and Mr. Martinez’s new employer.

Mr. Martinez, an analyst by training, was retired and had never served under cover; that is, he had never posed as a diplomat or a businessman while overseas. He had placed his home address, his personal e-mail address, his job as an intelligence officer and other personal details on a public Web site for the use of students at his alma mater. Abu Zubaydah had been captured six years earlier, Mr. Mohammed five years earlier; their stories were far from secret.

Mr. Martinez never agreed to talk to me. But a few e-mail exchanges with Mr. Kiriakou as I hunted for his former colleague would eventually turn up in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment; he was charged with revealing to me that Mr. Martinez had participated in the operation to catch Abu Zubaydah, a fact that the government said was classified.

Yeah, I know: That’s it? Shane solicits a quote from retired C.I.A. officer (and current Brookings Institution fellow and Daily Beast columnist) Bruce Riedel, for whom Kiriakou served capably while in the C.I.A.

“To me, the irony of this whole thing is, very simply, that he’s going to be the only C.I.A. officer to go to jail over torture,” even though he publicly denounced torture, Mr. Riedel said. “It’s deeply ironic under the Democratic president who ended torture.”

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